Social Media Engagement

The speed at which we do business, and the number of channels we’re using to do it, is rapidly increasing. Your customers and employees have many choices when it comes to communicating, and social media channels are key components of the customer journey. It’s crucial that today’s organizations embrace social as a key aspect of digital transformation, rethinking how they approach customers as well as internal communication.

Social media found its first foothold in most organizations through Marketing or PR, but has since expanded beyond those groups into teams like Customer Service and Sales. Service agents can meet customers on the channel of their choice to solve problems effectively. Sales teams can gather intelligence, source new leads, and build credibility through social selling. Employees in any role can leverage social insights to better understand the voice of the customer.

Microsoft Social Engagement, a part of Dynamics 365, helps your organization harness the power of social media to achieve real business results – not just Likes and Shares. Here, we’ll dive into how Microsoft Social Engagement empowers employees in Sales and Customer Service by augmenting what’s available in each of those Dynamics 365 applications to create more personalized customer engagements.

Build seller credibility

Today’s sales force isn’t just mobile: they’re social, too. The rich landscape of communication channels available has made things complicated, but has also opened up a myriad of possibilities for better, more informed engagement between buyers and sellers. Buyers use the wealth of information available to them online to learn more about the products they’re interested in or sellers they interact with, and social channels like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter are a huge piece of that. On the other side, sellers are using social channels to learn more about their customers and prospects and source new leads.

Microsoft Social Engagement empowers sales teams to sell more by leveraging social media through personalized, actionable smart recommendations from the newly released Social Selling Assistant. Social Selling Assistant, available through Microsoft AppSource, leverages the power of Azure Machine Learning to recommend content to share and keep you informed about your company, competitors, or customers on social. Best of all, Social Selling Assistant’s built-in intelligence and integration with the Dynamics 365 for Sales application means it takes only a few minutes each day for your sellers to build a credible social presence and learn what’s top-of-mind for customers.

Identify prospects and generate new leads

With artificial intelligence and machine learning, social media posts become leads through Microsoft Social Engagement and Dynamics 365 for Sales. We’ve developed the technology to detect intent in any social media post, with purchase intent being one indicator sellers can capitalize on. Machine learning trains the application to identify incoming posts with purchase intent, and feedback refines the results over time so they’re tailored for your organization. Instead of wasting time manually sorting through social media noise, posts can be automatically routed as leads into the Sales application, meaning your sales team doesn’t lose time switching back and forth between multiple applications and can address opportunities quickly.

Care for customers on whichever channel they choose

Like sales, the customer service process is more complex than ever, with phone, email, chat, and social all in the mix of channels your customers can choose to reach out. And with criticisms and complaints being so visible on social channels, what used to be a simple customer service issue now has the potential to become a major PR problem if an angry tweet reaches the right people. Customers expect a response to social media questions and complaints about service issues (many of them looking for that response in less than 24 hours), and many organizations face a great challenge in mounting a full-scale, omni-channel customer service team that can support these growing media.

Simplify service with intelligence

Microsoft Social Engagement enables effective omni-channel care by simplifying the process for service agents. From automatic intent detection for information requests, support requests, and complaints to smart sentiment and the ability to automatically route social posts as cases, agents can focus on delivering excellent customer service in a timely manner. If information requests, support requests and complaints aren’t the right categories for your organization, Microsoft Social Engagement offers the ability to create custom tags for categories that matter most to your team, and a few manual categorizations up front allow machine learning to start working, automatically tagging and routing the posts in your custom categories to Dynamics 365 for Customer Service to be resolved, or assigning them for triage right from Microsoft Social Engagement.

Not every word or phrase has the same connotation for each organization (think: the idea of a “kill” for a video game could be positive, while it has negative meaning in most other contexts), so while sentiment tagging in MSE is automated for 19 languages, it also operates with the same machine learning capabilities as intent and tagging—a little bit of feedback helps tailor the solution to your needs. With these capabilities, it’s easy for service agents to focus on the social posts that matter most without getting distracted by false positives.

Sales, Service, and Social with the power of Dynamics 365

Microsoft Social Engagement is included with most Dynamics 365 Application and Plan subscriptions at no extra cost, so everyone in your organization can have better, more personalized engagement with customers on social media.

Learn More

Curious about how social can change the way you engage with customers on your digital transformation journey? Learn more about Microsoft Dynamics 365, Microsoft’s next generation of intelligent business applications that unify CRM and ERP capabilities, enabling your organization to grow, evolve and transform to meet the needs of your customers and capture new opportunities.

Credit for this content goes to Elisabeth Michaud of Microsoft. She is a Product Marketing Manager for Dynamics 365, focusing on Social Engagement. Elisabeth focuses on telling the story of Microsoft Social Engagement, as well as social media functionality across all of Dynamics 365. She brings years of experience in the social media sector, including roles as a social media marketing and community manager and product marketer for a social analytics application at Hootsuite

As a Microsoft partner, we are the boots in the field and trenches with you. contact us today for a discovery session with your stakeholders and business unit heads to look at your road-map and agree on a roll out plan from the areas of priority and quick wins .